Anne Frank App Launches for Holocaust Memorial Day

One of the most celebrated books of all time, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, is launched as a richly immersive iPad and Nook app today. Sixty five years after it was first published by Anne's father, Otto Frank, the diary has been brought to life digitally for a new generation of readers and existing fans alike.

The app, which launches at £6.99, has been created by Viking, Penguin, digital producers Beyond The Story and the Anne Frank Fonds Basel. Transforming the book from flat text into a fully immersive user experience, the entire diary text is enhanced by interactive, multimedia embedded content, relevant to where the reader is in the story.

By simply tapping on a word, digital readers can explore Anne Frank's world through unprecedented historical context - video interviews, audio clips, archive images, education material and original illustrated features. This gives modern readers a greater sense of what living in hiding looked, sounded and felt like, and what, in turn, was happening outside the walls of the Secret Annexe where Anne spent two years before she and her family were betrayed to the Nazis.

Jen Porter, CEO and Founder of Beyond The Story: "This is an exciting step forward for book apps, taking the reader experience to a completely new level of interaction that is a world removed from the simplistic text replication of the e-book market. Anne's extraordinary experience is brought to life digitally in a way that she herself would never have conceived possible - and in a way will delight today's most digitally-savvy consumer."

Venetia Butterfield, Viking Publishing Director: "Seventy years since Anne began her diary it remains one of the most beloved books of all time. With the support of the Anne Frank Fonds Basel and Beyond The Story we are proud for The Diary of a Young Girl to be Penguin General's first App, and to bring Anne's story to readers in such an inspiring and sympathetic way."

Buddy Elias, Anne's cousin and President of the Anne Frank Fonds Basel: "This app takes the reader into an entirely new dimension of history and delivers important contexts on reading the diary."

Miranda McKearney OBE, director of national charity The Reading Agency: "Developments like the new Anne Frank app make me glad to be living through these revolutionary times for reading. Through The Reading Agency's work with young people and libraries, we know what a huge appetite there is for new blends of reading experiences. So we're delighted to be working with Penguin to enable young people and their reading groups to exclusively preview, blog and comment on the new app, through our Reading Partners consortium which enables library services and publishers to create successful and exciting events and activities for readers."

Broadcast quality video clip links

Emma Thompson, actress: "Anne Frank has always been a great inspiration - she wanted to be an actress and would, I am sure, have been fabulous. She was acute, witty, a brilliant writer, a person with endless curiosity about other people and with a breathless energy that always makes me feel happy when I read her. Ironic but true."

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Notes to Editors

About Beyond The Story:
Beyond The Story is a developer of innovative, multi-media publishing solutions that help publishers and other media businesses to use digital technologies to make more money from their assets in a fast, scalable and affordable way. The Company's lead product is an automated publishing platform that uses proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced authoring tools to transform a book from flat text to a fully immersive user experience, thereby bringing the story to life with interactive, multi-media embedded content which is relevant to where the reader is in the story.

About Anne Frank:
In the summer of 1942, fleeing the horrors of the Nazi occupation, Anne Frank and her family were forced into hiding in the back of an Amsterdam warehouse. Aged thirteen when she went into the Secret Annexe, Anne kept a diary in which she confided her innermost thoughts and feelings, movingly revealing how the eight people living under these extraordinary conditions coped with the daily threat of discovery and death, being cut off from the outside world, petty misunderstandings and the unbearable strain of living like prisoners. An intimate record of adolescence and heartbreak, courage and inspiration, the Anne Frank app enables readers to go beyond the words on the page to discover, enjoy and understand the extraordinary world of Anne Frank. Anne Frank and her sister Margot died in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, three months short of her sixteenth birthday and just a few weeks before the camp was liberated.